


The Hearts of Men

by Minish



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:23:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minish/pseuds/Minish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The short story of the followers of the Outsider and what always, inevitably, happens to them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hearts of Men

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Сердца человеческие](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016325) by [Herber_baby17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Herber_baby17/pseuds/Herber_baby17)



We had good intentions at first, I swear.

It was nothing like the Abbey portrayed us: we weren't sitting in circles singing praise to his name, holed up in abandoned buildings our whole lives and the like. It was just a group of people who'd all been touched by his presence and wanted to know more about him. And that's what droves us to the runes and the bone charms. To studying his influence. It was innocent. At least, I figured it was.

It's like he leaves little pieces of himself on those charms and runes, and they rub off on you if you're around them long enough. The problem lies, then, in that it became an obsession, and the longer we were around them the longer we wanted to be around them. We started getting bolder in our searches for him and the things he touched. We left our families, our hopes and dreams, all of it in the dust to find out more about him and to find any way to get closer to him. And that's when we started dropping like flies.

The first to go was Irving. He was a good man; a doctor who lost his wife to the plague, dedicated to finding any way he could to stopping it. He had kids, somewhere, grown up now, but we never met them. He was so dedicated -- he was sure that somewhere in this mess of charms and incantations there was something he could use to stop the death and destruction that ravaged our fair city, or so he said. I guess I'll never know if that was the truth or if he was just obsessed and wanted an excuse, but I'd like to believe it is. He had a great presence about him; he was the kind of guy who, when he got excited, inspired you to do great things. 

About six months in Irving started getting jumpy and paranoid, always leaping practically a foot whenever he heard someone behind him. We couldn't find him outside of our meetings anymore. We'd later find out he'd been locking himself up in his house. Stuff started going missing -- we shared everything we found, kept it locked up in the warehouse where we met. Trusting him with the key was a bad idea, it turned out, when we found him dead on the floor with a jagged piece of carved whalebone sticking out of his throat. I'd seen bodies from the plague --we all had-- but this was the first time I'd seen a corpse that still looked... _human_. It shook all of us up a little and we decided to be more careful -- give the meetings a rest for a little while. We'd all seen what his influence could do to people and we didn't want to be next.

Two or three weeks later we started up the meetings again and we all seemed a bit better for the break. We started scavenging again and felt all the better for it. Our collection of items pertaining to him grew exponentially. We were subtle enough that we managed to avoid the Overseers' judgmental gaze. It should only follow, then, that only a week or so later it was Lyn we found.

She was a good girl, only just an adult, if even that. We never really asked her. She said she had a bad home life, and ever since he appeared to her she'd been seeking him. It was pretty clear she was just trying to distract herself from the things she was going through, and given the bruises that would show up on her skin every now and again, we were more than happy to oblige that. It was remarkable how positive she remained despite her situation. Then again, I guess that's always how it happened; it was the ones who had been through the most shit that smiled the brightest, or so they said. Looking back, I'm not certain I believe that. I only wish I'd been able to figure out who it was that was hurting her before she left us.

Lyn was pretty intensive about this whole thing, as you can probably imagine. And who cares, we figured, anything to ease the pain. I wish we could've seen past that fake smile plastered onto her face and into what was really going on, because then maybe we could've stopped her before it was too late. 

She'd been pretty interested in the whole black magic thing, how others who apparently 'worshiped' him could attain these incredible abilities, draw them out of runes and charms and such. Against our warnings, she started looking a little more into it, and it seems shortly after that was when she started performing the rituals. She got what she wanted, I suppose. 

After we started meeting up again she was spacey, distracted, and then only the next day she stopped showing up altogether. I remember it was kind of freaking me out because of how into the whole thing she was, so I started going looking to see if I could find her. We all knew some people who knew other people and eventually we tracked her down in an apartment off Clavering Boulevard. Me and another guy took the liberty of going on ahead to see if she was okay, figured we could rough up whoever was giving her crap. Turns out we didn't need to.

Stepping in there, the first thing I noticed was the stench, and that's never a good sign. I thought maybe it was the plague at first, and I was close. We stepped into the building and followed it up to a room on the second floor, and that's where the two of them were. To this day I don't know if he was her father or if it was some kind of fucked up marriage, and to be honest I don't want to. His bones were visible all over, and he barely had any of his face left. Muscle and everything else was exposed, too, and when I saw it I almost vomited. It was clear he'd been there for a few days, at least. There were rats all over the place, enough that we had to kill a few who wouldn't leave us alone. 

Slumped over in the back of the room, there she was. Her body was perhaps the single most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life.Holes were torn through muscle and bone and her flesh was almost completely stripped away, but it was clearly Lyn. That wasn't even the worst of it; it was clear that there were rats _inside_ of her. Gnawing their way out. The both of us left as fast as we could and I think I was sick on the ground.

It was pretty clear that this whole thing was a bad idea, but by that point we were all starting to be affected and so the meetings carried on. We were no closer to finding anything more out about him than we ever were, but that didn't stop us. Everyone calls it something different; we said we wanted to know more, others said they wanted to meet him, some said they wanted an escape. But in reality, it's just an instinct, one that drives you like rats to the corpses. We just wanted more of him, as much of him as we could find, and that's why we'd amassed this collection.

Next up was Frank, who by the end was a good friend of mine, someone I could trust. It was him who found Lyn's body with me, and in retrospect, maybe that was what pushed him over the edge. He looked like kind of a dumb thug, really, and I think that scared off most of the people he knew. Really, though, he was stone-cold brilliant and it was him who found much of the stuff we had to begin with. He always seemed a little detached from the whole thing, probably for his own good. I think maybe he knew the whole thing was wrong, maybe had some inkling of an idea that it would go this way, but didn't want to believe it. 

It was a personal thing for Frank. When he was a kid his parents were taken into custody by the Overseers and never came back. They were the type of hardcore occultists earlier described, the ones with the rituals and the like. So I guess that affected him from a pretty young age, and that probably had to do with all of this too. But really, he was just trying to continue his parents work somehow, I think. To him, it was like his own private little rebellion against the Overseers for what they did, even if he never talked about it. He told me about his parents in private, told me not to tell anyone else. He was pretty calm most of the time, but really he must've been burning up inside, and he just didn't want to flaunt it.

Really, I think Frank might've had some kind of sanity left in him, and honestly I think that's what drove him to kill himself like he did. Wanted to go out while he was still himself, maybe. 

By then it was three of us left: Frank, Callie and I. When Frank stopped showing I started getting really uncomfortable around Callie, like I always did, and so I went looking, even though I already knew what I would find. I didn't want to see it, but I kind of had to at this point. Found him locked up in his apartment; I had to kick the door down. It was a gun that he used, in the end, and I think it's real sad that that's the least fucked up of the deaths we had.

So naturally, Callie was last. By then I was practically dead inside myself. Never went home anymore. Rarely ever ate, and when I did it was always stuff like rat meat and anything else I could pick up off the streets. I didn't even have it in me to be sad.

Callie was the one who came to me first, when she saw me pick up one of his runes while I was searching one of the quarantined districts. Told me she'd been touched by him, too, when she was young, and she was trying to find him. To actually get to him, somehow, even though we all knew he was far off, in his void, wherever it was. I never knew much about Callie. She was quiet and dark and only spoke when strictly necessary. The two of us being last was kind of fitting, in a way. Finishing things the same way they'd started.

I was there when she did it. Jumped off a rooftop, saying he was going to catch her.

I left her body. Didn't want to look. Didn't really care anymore.

Looking back on what happened to all of us, I wonder only one thing: is this what he does to people? Is he some monster who leeches off of the death and the insanity of others? Is this what he wants? Really, I don't think so. I think he gives us all a choice, the choice of what to do with what he gives us. And I think most people choose wrong. It's kind of like some sort of social experiment, proving how most people are just inherently bad. He just brings out what's already there, magnifies it a little. We all had a choice. We could have stopped, or talked about what was going on. But we didn't. None of us did, and none of us wanted to. I only ever met him once, but when I did, he didn't feel evil. Not that he felt good, either. He felt, though. He felt. 

I'm writing this because I want someone to know where we all went. I don't have any family anymore, but I'm sure somewhere, the rest of them did, and it's my most sincere of hopes that someday one of them picks this up and reads it and tells the others. I want everyone to know that we're sorry for what we did and it was wrong, and now we're gone because of it.

By the time you're reading this, I think I'll be dead.

* * *

In the flooded district, there is hardly any life, save for Daud and his disciples. After all, one cannot truly consider the Weeping life. 

Somewhere there, there is a complex of homes, three stories high. And on the third story there is a tiny apartment that reeks of death and plague, and rats scuttle in and out of the walls. In the corner is a makeshift idol of some sort, a pedestal with a bone set upon it, held up with string and wood and metal with a rich purple cloth hung up behind it. On the bone is carved a symbol, and it is that symbol's owner who came to that apartment on that night.

Leaning against the room's back wall is a man, he is barely clinging to life. He has not eaten in far too long, and nary a drop of water remains in his body. His skin is dry and cracked, and he is waiting for the end, waiting for the pain to stop. In those dry, cracked hands is a leatherbound book with dry, cracked pages, and on those dry, cracked pages is month-old ink. That ink tells the sad story of a group of people with nowhere to go, and it ends in their deaths.

Soon, another man enters the apartment. His wears a shabby brown coat, and a certain blackness surrounds him. His eyes are darker than the hearts of men, and he need not walk on their ground if he does not wish to. He is from Somewhere Else, from Outside of this world, from the Circumscribed Void.

The dying man is almost blind now, but he still sees the other man materialize in the shadows, and seconds later feels the journal being lifted from his lap. He feels a flicker of recognition, but his mind is lost now. He feels sleep closing in, and he welcomes it. Before he dies, however, that man hears a sound; it is a soft voice, one that somewhere, sometime he has heard before.

"Interesting." 


End file.
